The three stories, “A & P”, “The One Girl at the Boys’ Party”, and “Rites of Passage” all are somewhat abstract stories and all have hidden meanings and themes behind them. They are all made up of pieces, that if broken down, it can sometimes help you see the greater meaning behind them.
In class, we did an exercise for all the stories. First, we took all the pieces that make up the short story or poem and organize them. Then, we took all of these pieces and looked at the way that the author used them or put them together. After looking at the way the pieces are put together, we can sometimes get a better view of the puzzle that the author laid out in their work.
This process helped me see the stories in a different way and see a better moral and theme than what I had initially made. First, we take apart “A & P” and begin to see that Updike was not just trying to tell a story, but trying to display a feeling of empty heroism or vanity. I think that Updike was just trying to show people in a story that a lot of times, heroism and good deeds go overlooked or completely unnoticed. Second, in “The One Girl at the Boys’ Party”, Olds appears to be using a play on words by using math to describe something in a beautiful way, but after taking this poem apart, we begin to see that she may actually be trying to show how the girl stands her own amongst the boys and how she is not the little girl that Olds wants to be. In other words, the Olds was trying to show how the girl was growing up. In the last story, “Rites of Passage”, Olds might seem like she’s just describing her son’s birthday party, but upon a closer look, we will see that she uses many similes and metaphors to describe the boys that would normally be used to describe men and vice versa. I think that she is trying to show that boys often act like men and men often act like boys, or even perhaps she is just saying that boys never really grow up.